The collected works of Lana Brindley: writer, speaker, blogger

Category Archives: OpenStack

This Summit was a homecoming of sorts. OpenStack started in Austin with 750 people, and returned six years and twelve conferences later with 7500 people. Even the baristas in the downtown coffee shops noticed us the second time around.

For documentation, this conference was bigger than usual as well. We had a total of eight sessions, in addition to the contributor meetup on the last day, which is more docs sessions than we have ever had before.

And we had a lot to talk about! The biggest thing on our minds was the future of the OpenStack Installation Guide. The Big Tent has changed the way that projects go about joining the OpenStack ecosystem, and with Foundation having an increased focus on ensuring new projects have sufficient documentation, we needed to change our approach to documenting the installation of an OpenStack cloud. There is no ‘right’ way to install a cloud any more, and there is certainly no ‘right’ set of components you should be installing when you do it. But with a small documentation team, and a seemingly endless parade of new components requiring documentation, we were faced with a big technical challenge, where everyone had some kind of skin in the game. Despite some differences of opinion, the session itself was extremely productive, and we came away with a solid set of deliverables for Newton. First of all, we’re going to create the infrastructure to allow projects to write their own installation docs in their repos, and then publish them seamlessly to the docs.openstack.org front page. This means that projects have responsibility for their own docs, but the docs team will provide assistance in the form of templates and infrastructure support to ensure that all projects are treated as first class citizens. Secondly, the existing Installation Guide will change focus to be more about an installation tutorial, giving people a highly opinionated and completely manual installation method to learn the ropes, but not to install a production cloud. Thanks to the OpenStack User Survey, we can safely say that most production clouds are installed using some kind of automated tool, so having manual installation instructions is useful as a training tool, but not in a real world scenario.

With the big question more or less settled, we got on to the fairly long laundry list of other things that needed to be done, which all ended up focusing mostly on streamlining some of our processes, being clearer about the way we operate, consolidating guides that had (for obscure historical reasons) been in their own repos into the main one again, and general editing and tidying up. A full list of the goals can be seen here: Newton Docs Deliverables. And, for historical interest, here’s the whiteboard from the Summit session:

During the Mitaka release, docs had a focus on Manageability, aiming to work more effectively and efficiently, with a focus on collaboration. For Newton, while manageability themes are still very much present, the focus is more on Scalability, and making our documentation efforts scale out to represent a much greater proportion of products, contributors, operators, and users. From empowering projects to write their own documentation with our support, to making our processes simpler to find and understand, to ensuring our documentation is as accurate, up-to-date, and effective as possible, it’s going to be an exciting cycle for docs!

I leave you with one of my favourite Texan big things: a bathtub margarita!

linux.conf.au this year is being held on the beautiful University of Western Australia campus, in Perth.

About 500 geeks have descended on the campus, with talks being organised into six topic streams across three days. The conference is entirely volunteer-run, with financial and community support from Linux Australia. The conference is designed by and for developers, with an emphasis on deeply technical talks. Of course, it’s not all code, though. An important aspect of open source technology is the community, and usually one track at linux.conf.au is dedicated to community matters such as diversity, governance, and documentation.

Every year, the conference schedule belies a popular trend in open source tech. This year, that trend has definitely been OpenStack, with many talks discussing various aspects of the project including continuous integration, bare metal provisioning, and deployment. Some of the highlights (to watch video of these talks, see the links at the end of this post):

One of the most important and interesting aspects of OpenStack is its ability to link in with other projects to extend and expand its use. The conference has been a great opportunity for developers to work out how they can use OpenStack to help their own projects. Rackspace also helped encourage this by offering developers at the conference free access to the Rackspace cloud for OpenStack developers.

Of course, sometimes it’s not just the formal talks at a conference that are the best part. Sometimes it’s all about meeting a new person who might be able to help you out with that sticky problem, or catching up with old friends and having the opportunity to just geek out for a little while over a nice meal and maybe a drink or two.

linux.conf.au doesn’t start until Wednesday, but that didn’t stop an eager group of Rackspace engineers rocking up on Sunday night.We didn’t just sit around in empty conference rooms, though. Michael Still (he’s a Nova core and manages a team of OpenStack engineers in Australia), ran an OpenStack miniconference, which is an informal, day-long session before the formal conference opening. We heard from people from all over the OpenStack universe, including HP, Catalyst, Canonical, and IBM, and the topics of conversation hit upon all aspects of the project. For a full list of the speakers and topics, head along to the miniconf site.
The general idea of this informal start to the conference is to give like-minded people a chance to get together and discuss things that are important to them before the formal conference sessions begin. The miniconfs also act as an incubator of sorts, to be able to foster and encourage people who might be interested in a topic to dip their toes further into the water. The OpenStack miniconf in particular gave people an opportunity to learn about OpenStack development, help them to understand the state of the nation of OpenStack and what things they might be able to help with, and to provide a bunch of knowledgeable people for them to ask questions of.This is Michael talking to Anita Kuno, an OpenStack developer from HP, who discussed support services for OpenStack developers during the miniconf.
Of course, the other really awesome thing about the miniconf is that gave a chance for OpenStack developers to get together in person. People who have chatted and argued on a mailing list or in code reviews during the year can often find common ground over a quick chat in between sessions, or during a Q&A session.And now that the miniconf is done, it’s time to get the conference started! Stay tuned for another post about linux.conf.au.

Where the bloody hell are ya?!

Who wrote all this stuff?

All writing on this blog is the work of Lana Brindley and does not necessarily reflect the view of Rackspace, OpenStack, or any other group with which I am affiliated, except where I have used direct quotes (which are attributed to the original authors where possible). All images were either taken by me, shared under their individual licencing requirements, or obtained as stock photography.